How well does HPNA work?

So, I'm really interested in the Rio Receiver, but that's mostly because of the HPNA support. I really don't want to string ethernet cable all over my house, and if I were going to do that, I'd probably go with a slimp3, because they look cool.

Anyway, I haven't been able to find any reviews of HPNA anywhere. In particular, I live in an older house. How well does HPNA work over medium-quality phone lines? Just how good is this thing? I'd think if it were great that everybody would be using it, but I just don't hear very much about it.

Comments? Thanks!
John

The HPNA performance is going to depend on the number and quality of phone line splices in your house.

At my house, I have my phone lines spliced in a dozen different ways, for multiple modems, fax machines, extra phone extensions, answering machines, etc. And they're not nice clean in-wall splices, they're done with external plug-in splitters and half-assed wiring schemes. In some cases, I'm deliberately trading the line1 pair for the line2 pair and back again. I'm doing more with my phone lines than most other sane people do in their houses.

So when I tried the receiver with HPNA, I discovered that it would only work if I unplugged a couple of the more flaky connections (specifically, the computer modems), and would tend to work best if the products in question were connected directly to the wall jacks with short cables.

If I tried daisy-chaining the receiver through another device (such as through an external splitter to one of the modem connections), then the HPNA connection was flaky.

So I resorted to running ethernet and haven't looked back. In retrospect, I could have achieved satisfactory results with HPNA by simplifying and cleaning up all of my external wiring splices. Another possible factor is that I was using some pretty long cable runs with flat phone wire, which might have been improved if I'd replaced the flat wire with twisted-pair wire.

So HPNA is easily do-able as long as you haven't rube-goldberg'ed your phone system.

I live in a newer house, with sane wiring, and hpna rocks.

I have 3 rio receivers around the house using HPNA, and I also run lan connections to bedrooms and offices. I also have an Xbox in my living room and I use a tiny hpna bridge to hook it up to the internet.

HPNA is a great way to get a 10mbit connection in every room, easily. I have zero complaints.

Same experience with HPNA. 20 year old wiring, 4 Rio's rockin...

Hi Tony - Mark Surfas here. LAVABALL!

I use several 50' flat cable extensions. They work fine.

Good to see you again!

Basty! What brings you to this neck of the woods? Welcome!

My house is around 50 years old and has had a lot of amateurish wire modifications done over the years. I was only able to get HPNA to work with about 90% reliability. I finally broke down and bought two Linksys WAP11's to form a wireless bridge. It was a big expense but I'd grown to really like having all of my music in the living room and spending the bucks was still preferable to running ethernet through the walls and attic.

-Dylan

Mine works pretty well. The only conflict I have is with my DSL connection. I have to shut it down to use my Receivers.

hmmm that seems awefully strange... I thought HPNA and DSL were purposefully placed on different frequencies so that they don't interfere? (above 2MHz for HPNA, 25kHz to 1.1MHz for DSL)

I just set up HPNA yesterday (running alongside a DSL connection) and other than a little problem with the PC thinking the HPNA card was the main internet connection it worked fine... Which really surprised me after seeing the odd splicing done in the basement...

A lot cheaper than the wireless stuff I've been running (mainly because I wanted an excuse to try out wireless)

I don't know that the HPNA/DSL combo is the actual source of the problem, but running only one does fix it for me.